number 9

You’ve probably noticed the
‘10% off everything within our borders’
Christmas sale the States are having.
When you combine that with the price difference between US and UK shops,
it’s tempting to import stuff (although customs are trying hard to dissuade me ).

Luckily there no duty on bytes (give them time) . So it’s a good time to get non-corporeal booty (and I don’t mean Aaliyah).

(NB: I have these already – I’m not fishing (although I wouldn’t say no to a container if you’re going to the bar).

The final version of the DRM-free 2nd edition PragProg Rails PDF
has dropped.
Unlike the book, it gets regular errata updates, is searchable and you can download the code. It’s about 12 pounds.

If you want to clear out a houseful of servers, Textdrive shared hosting is less than a pound a week if you buy a year up front.

I’ve been with them over a year now
and it’s been really good. Last winter the host I was on was a bit flaky, but it’s been fine since. I got the $99/year deal in August and have had 0 issues that weren’t of my own making since.

They’ve also said that anyone who has one of:

• $15/month of Strongspace (5Gb of https/ssh/rsync-able disk, 5 users)
• $15/month of Joyent Connector (groupware, 5 users )
• $15/month of the shared hosting I just mentioned

will be automatically upgraded in the New Year to ‘Joyent Core’ – which is all the above for $15/month.

I’m with jwz on groupware , but Strongspace uses
ZFS (Thumpers) for storage , so
I’ll trust it more than some other NAS I could mention .

If it sounds worth having, get a month of shared ($12) before shelling out for a year – davie is solid, but some shared boxes are more equal than others .

(Textdrive are actually doing a referral scheme, so in theory I could pimp them out, but it’s too much of a pain in the arse to get the dollars over here (they pay in bushels of straw or something)).

Had one of those weeks where stuff goes pop for no good reason.

First eris, my FreeBSD IMAP/db/Rails/everything-important server screwed its disk (either it’s GEOM in RELENG_5 or the disk itself, but it crashes after an hours use).

Since I’ve started looking at the really very teeny network appliance market lately, I decided now was a good time to get things offsite. Everything is bound to break when I plug in the Linksys anyway, so I might as well do it myself.

First we got assimilated by The Hive. 10 minutes with the exim config and our mail is offloaded there. (incidentally it’s fucking awesome. I’ll talk about that again. )

I got MySQL and Wordpress onto littlebird, the NetBSD wireless gateway, which had a new 1Ghz mini-itx board in it. Found I can reliably kill it by running build.sh tools. This box forwards to gmail, so I need it. Go back to the old board.

But being in the shit is the mother of invention, as they say, so I finally got a $12 Textdrive account to point MX at. Today I finally got round to resurrecting this blog too.

Good stuff so far:

• The Web interfaces are by and large a joy to use – mysql access and account creation in particular (I’d rather vi my mail aliases as it’s less pain than clicking forms with RSI)
• you get a lot of bells and whistles for your money. (svn / mysql / lighttpd / full featured mail services / nice development environment )
• ssh access. lovely.
• support. I must’ve driven them mad by now, I’ve raised five tickets since the weekend but should calm down now I’ve got the basics covered.
• security and spam are SEP
• Less servers on my WLAN. Less noisy fans. Less stuff to break (Anything that escapes ebay == test rigs, and no-one cares if they break. )
• extras. knowledge base, forums etc. Especially like the RSS status page , that’s a top idea.

niggles:

• stability. this host has been down a bit, but not for long and I don’t have to fix it.
• not having root takes some getting used to. It’s odd seeing your mail sitting in the outbound queue but not being able to read it there.